Dusk felland the cold came creeping,cam prickling into our hearts.As we tucked beaksinto feathers and settled for sleep,our wings knew. That night, we dreamed the journey:ice-blue sky and the yodel of flight,the sun’s pale wafer,the crisp drink of clouds.We dreamed ourselves so far aloftthat the earth curved beneath usand nothing sang buta whistling vee of… Continue reading Joyce Sidman
and a world stilled for a secondas if it had stopped breathing as if in the space between breathsthe brain might float like a planet on nothing and the eye open to a flensing, pared downto a pulse and the long less than an instant a word takes to thread one soul to the next… Continue reading Fred Marchant
The sunlight passes through the window into the roomWhere you are sewing a button to your blouse: outsideWater in the fountain risesToward a cloud. This plume of water is lighterNow, for white shares of itself are falling backToward the ground.This water does succeed, like us,In nearing a perfect exhaustion,Which is its origin. The water Succeeds… Continue reading Norman Dubie
The dustin my lungs, Knock itout of me. — Marty McConnell, from “Elegy” Court Green 12 (2015)
I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn’t happiness. — William Saroyan, The Bicycle Rider in Beverly Hills ( Charles Scribner’s Sons; 1st edition, January 1, 1952)
Time is the villain in most tales, and here, too,Lowering its stiff body into the water.Its landscape is the resurrection of the word,No end of it, the petals of wreckage in everything. —Charles Wright, from “The Southern Cross,” The Southern Cross (Random House, 1981)
Sunrise You candie for it–an idea,or the world. People have done so,brilliantly,lettingtheir small bodies be bound to the stake,creatingan unforgettablefury of light. But this morning,climbing the familiar hillsin the familiarfabric of dawn, I thought of China,and Indiaand Europe, and I thoughthow the sun blazesfor everyone justso joyfullyas it rises under the lashesof my own eyes,… Continue reading Mary Oliver
As always, silence will have the last word, — Charles Wright, from “The Southern Cross,” The Southern Cross (Random House, 1981)
We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects. ― Herman Melville
If you lovesomeone, the water moves upfrom the well. — Jason Shinder, from “Little America,” Stupid Hope (Graywolf Press, 2009)
The Vale of Soul-Making 